Translating Baudelaire - EUROPEAN LITERATURE Author:Clive Scott 'Clive Scott's Translating Baudelaire offers exhilarating perspectives on the practice of (verse) translation. Imbued with a postmodernist sense of the mobility and provisionality of text, he seeks to liberate the translator from what he calls "pre-postmodernist" anxieties . . . His unrivalled ability to analyse French verse and his remarkable... more » talents as a wordsmith, indeed as a poet, combine to produce compelling renderings of some of Baudelaire's finest verse. His book is an intoxicating invitation to jouissance, promising redemption from "a state of punishment, in which we are compelled to reiterate our sense of loss". But after he has explicated his own, fine translation of "Le Voyage"-his choices of form and lexis, his "intercutting" (intertextually inspired additions) and allusions-one may be left with the residual sense of having been lured into an artificial paradise, a pre-postlapsarian realm as it were, in which the translator has conscious intentions which explain his text. One had thought such an author dead.' - Times Literary Supplement, April 27, 2001« less